Guests: Blue Jays reliever Yimi Garcia, catcher Tyler Heineman, Atlanta 3B coach Matt Tuiasosopo

We celebrate the 250th episode of the podcast with the first-ever 1-on-1 interview with Yimi Garcia in English. The big, scary set-up man with the 0.00 ERA turns out to be a gentle giant off the mound! We also check in with back-up catcher Tyler Heineman, who is off to a sizzling start to the season, both at the plate and behind it, and since Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has officially signed up to become a Blue Jay for life, we wanted to chat with someone who was a Blue Jay for about 20 minutes once upon a time –current Atlanta third-base coach Matt Tuiasosopo joins us.

Guests: Blue Jays icons Pat Hentgen and Vernon Wells

With Vladimir Guerrero Jr. putting pen to paper on the second-largest contract in baseball history, one that will keep him with the team until 2039, when he’s forty years old, and could very well make him the first “Forever Blue Jay,” we are joined by two of the greatest players in club history. Pat Hentgen, who won 19 games for the 1993 World Series champs and picked up the team’s first Cy Young award in 1996, was a Blue Jay for 10 years and in the organization for 15. Vernon Wells, who is in the top five of almost every offensive category in the Jays’ all-time record book and still holds the team’s single-season record with 215 hits (2003), spent 12 years with the Jays and was in the organization for 14. They’ll talk about what it means to play in Toronto for a long time, to be stars here, and what the future could hold for Vladdy as a fellow iconic Blue Jay who will rewrite the team’s record book and may well be headed for Cooperstown by the time he’s done.

Overnight, the news broke that the Jays and their superstar slugger have agreed to the second-largest contract in baseball history. Guerrero will be a Blue Jay through his age-40 season with a 14-year, $500 million (U.S.) deal that kicks in beginning next season. We threw down a special bonus episode of Deep Left Field for you, sharing our thoughts about what this means, why it happened now and who could have been behind the final push to get a deal done nearly two months after Guerrero’s deadline passed. We also took your questions and comments on Bluesky!